That file format is called Property List because they often store application properties such as user settings.

This blog post introductes a Django application for serializing Django model objects and regular Python types into Property List XML!

The package is called django-plist and the source is available at Github. It is also available from the Python Package Index, install it with easy_install django_plist.

The README file documents the installation process and how to use the application to serialize Django objects, but I’ll give a small teaser here, just to get your attention!

Say we have a model Blog and we want to expose all Blog objects as an array of objects at one URL endpoint and single Blog objects as a dictionary at another endpoint. Point your Objective-C code to the URLs and read it with [NSArray arrayWithContentsOfUrl] and [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfUrl]. And voilá your Python objects are available as arrays and dictionaries in Objective-C!

The main interface for django-plist is two generic views, you’ll use these views just as you would use the generic views in Django:

from django_plist.views.generic import plist_array, plist_dict

blog_info = {'queryset': Blog.objects.all()}

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('^all_entries/$', plist_array, blog_info),
    url('^single_entry/(?P<object_id>\d+)/$', plist_dict, blog_info),
)

Read about the different ways you can customize the generic views and the parameters they take in the documentation.

If you find django-plist useful, please drop me a line!